Review of The Road

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The Road follows one man and his son as they travel across post-apocalyptic America in search of warmer climes after humanity has sealed its own fate with an undescribed cataclysmic event. The towns and cities of old have been burned to the ground and all foliage has met a similar end as they are surrounded by a world of grey misery as they make their way along old highways scavaging for tinned foods and dodging lawless cannibals who will kill and eat anything in order to survive.

Despite the settings, the storytelling is very cyclic in nature, with the boy and his dad doing the same thing day after day, and the descriptions of building a fire, walking all day, eating, making a camp and building another fire are quite tedious after a while as you'd imagine. What starts as an extremely bleak and scene-setting section of prose becomes repetitive and mundane, which is obviously supposed to represent the blandness of human life on earth in this troubled times, but it makes for dull reading. Furthermore, the style of writing leaves little or no punctuation in sentences, there are no chapter breaks, the lines and sentences are extremely short and the dialogue almost irrelevant.

Aside from these factors, it's still a mildly entertaining story and the idiosyncrasies of their journey (eg, finding a train, another human being etc) are extremely entertaining despite their modern day inanity, because the rest of the story is so repetitive. Because of the style of writing though, I wouldn't recommend this to any of my friends.